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The current Information Age that will largely define the 21st-century economy began in the 1990s with the rallying cry: “Information wants to be free!”

Yet today, increasing amounts of information are slipping behind paywalls, including one to be created by the Toronto Star’s online edition this year. A corollary to Francis Bacon’s aphorism that “Knowledge is power” is that someone will try to charge you for it.

Since 1996, though, the Internet Archive (IA), an online library based in Richmond, Calif., has been quietly keeping faith with the web’s founding premise of “Universal access to all knowledge,” the IA’s motto. If not the last redoubt of freely available content, the Internet Archive is among the most ambitious and aggressive. Which makes it one of the great public services of modern times.

A mere 500,000 people per day access the galaxy of content available on the IA, a bit shy of the 1 billion subscribers claimed by Facebook, whose zeal for profit-maximization characterizes today’s Internet. Then again, few know of the IA’s existence, even after it crossed the 10-petabyte threshold in accumulated content last October. “We’re not yet the equivalent of 1,000 Libraries of Congress,” says the IA’s founder and chief digital archivist, Brewster Kahle. “But we’re starting to get there.”

The U.S. Library of Congress contains about 25 terabytes, or trillions of bytes, of data. The IA already far eclipses that with its 10 quadrillion bytes. (A byte historically is the eight 1’s and 0’s needed to encode a single character of text on a computer.)

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The IA’s user-friendly “Wayback Machine” alone has archived 240 billion web pages. And the IA has not only digitized some 3 million traditional books, but it saves the books and other printed material it digitizes. Indeed, the IA is in pursuit of a copy of each of the estimated 100 million books ever published. It regards the book as an unsurpassed storage medium, given the comparative unreliability of everything we’ve conceived since, from 8-track tapes and CDs to temperamental hard drives and Hollywood features that until recent times were melted down for their silver content and recycled.

Admittedly, a tour of the IA can be as time-consuming as visits to the Louvre and the Uffizi combined, since the IA digitizes such broad swathes of knowledge. That includes 1.2 million movies; 4.5 million texts, including Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale; 1.6 million audio recordings, including salvaged 78-rpm big band recordings from the 1920s; some 115,000 music concerts, including the Grateful Dead at Nassau Coliseum in 1981; and the world’s oldest known cute-cat video, an early product of Thomas Edison’s studio dating from 1894.

“We know how to get information out of every book ever written, every television program broadcast in the entire world, the music off LPs, the videos off DVDs,” IA archivist Alexis Rossi has told a Deepspeed Media documentarian. “Given enough money, we absolutely already have the technology to do this. The question is whether we have the will to do it.”

The IA archivists embody the founding Internet spirit that information should be freely and easily available to everyone, though IA’s archivists generally resist the 1990s claim that knowledge-empowered populations would cast off the chains of political tyranny and enslavement to materialism. In outlook the IA corps is closer to Noah and his ark, on a mission simply to collect and rescue knowledge for all time.

“I suppose we could put it all into the cloud,” Kahle says, citing the current shift to cloud computing. “But that means commercial control. It could be turned off at any moment.”

Obviously a great deal of world knowledge has been lost. So the IA has already partially duplicated itself, both at the new Library of Alexandria and in donated space in Amsterdam. That’s a blessed redundancy that the original great library at Alexandria lacked.

Out of ego, libraries fearful of lessening their importance do not duplicate their holdings elsewhere. “The Library of Congress has already burned once,” Kahle notes. “And if only the original Library of Alexandria had made a copy of itself, and put it in India or China, we’d now have the lost works of Aristotle and Euripides.”

The IA could bill itself as “the world’s library,” since no institution matches its global, multimedia scope, offering a mélange of British Patent Office tomes, contemporary accounts of upgrading Nepal’s radio networks, worldwide TV ads and industrial films, and underwater hockey videos.

The world thus shrinks from the “global village” that Marshall McLuhan so presciently forecast to a global town square.

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